Gejagtes Gold

Haunted Gold is perhaps the closest John Wayne ever got to making a horror picture. It comes complete with secret passages, a ghostly figure, a graveyard, and a creepy butler.

There's great spooky atmosphere in the early scenes but the scary stuff is soon abandoned in favor of a more conventional tale featuring bandits and the theft of a gold mine.

The photography and sets are exquisite and the action scenes are top-notch, even if the script is typical. Fans of John Wayne and nineteen-thirties B-westerns will find it interesting if not entirely spectacular.

However, Haunted Gold is tainted a bit by the racial stereotypes represented by Wayne's annoying sidekick Clarence, played by Blue Washington. The modern viewer might get a little embarrassed while watching it.

An early John Wayne western that only ran for an hour, this was surprisingly entertaining. Since he was a beginning actor and this was a Grade B-type of production, I didn't except it to be so entertaining, although now that I've watched a lot of early '30s films, I am not surprised. Movies in that era were pretty fast- moving ones.

What makes this fun is the combination of western action, a few spooky things and comedy. The latter is mostly supplied by Blue Washington who plays "Clarence Washington Brown," a Mantan Morleand-like character. Yeah, I know this kind of role is demeaning to blacks and it's almost embarrassing to watch nowadays, but Washington was funny. The "western" part of the story is just so-so.

This western reminds me of an "old house film".....a ghost town with a "real" ghost! Secret panels, shadows on the walls, eyes peering thru slits in the walls, etc.

It also gives Blue Washington the chance for some great "scared reaction" comedy (ala' Mantan Moreland or Willie Best).

I don't much care for westerns, but the "supernatural" elements in this film make it worth watching!

An early Wayne western. Very entertaining and just plain fun! Wayne plays John Mason. He receives a letter prompting him to return and claim his half of a gold mine called the "Sally Anne". When Wayne returns he finds a girl … imagine that! She by chance had also received a letter.

He then finds himself taking on some bandits in a haunted mine with a crazy catacomb of tunnels, under a ghost town, complete with creepy shadows, trap doors, secret passages & even organ music. As stated above it's just a fun who-dun-it. A weird kind of mix of mystery meets western. To the best of my recollection this had never been done prior to this movie ... and even if it had it was still a bit refreshing for me.

John Wayne made scores of B-Westerns in the thirties, and in some ways the few he did for Warner Bros. were among the more interesting, having somewhat better production values and execution. There are elements in "Haunted Gold" that would never have been covered by the budget of one of his Monogram programmers, but that's not saying much. It's pretty much the same old thing we'd see from Wayne for the next six or seven years -- good guy helps a sweet young thing outwit nefarious baddies out to cheat her or him out of something. Wayne has physical charm yet is still a callow actor at this time, though no one does much real acting in these. There's no George Hayes to lend true gravitas to the situation, and Erville Alderson, while always an interesting specimen to look at in the movies, is really terrible as a performer in the solid older man part. It's all not really much, until an exciting fight in a cable car between Wayne and an outlaw near the end. What is most notable (and most difficult) about the movie is the sidekick character, Clarence. "Haunted Gold" isn't the first nor would it be the last Hollywood movie to give a black actor bug-eyed terror and clichéd dialect for racial comic effect. But if there can be degrees of acceptability to such stereotyping, this movie seems to take it to a painful degree. For one thing, Blue Washington, who plays Clarence, is a strong, masculine figure of a man -- tall, muscled, intelligent of mien -- yet he scampers about whimpering about spooks and monsters like skinny little Willie Best. It seems immeasurably more degrading (though I'm not suggesting it wasn't degrading for other actors). Perhaps part of the difference is that Willie Best and Mantan Moreland, when they did their frightened "darkie" routine, were funny -- very funny. Watching Blue Washington do this stuff is like watching Sidney Poitier or James Earl Jones do it -- it's difficult not to focus on the humiliation of the actor. The script contains plenty of references to "darkies" and "Smoky" and "that watermelon accent," though Wayne's character treats Clarence more as an amusing comrade than a dimwit or a servant. But none of this makes "Haunted Gold" less uncomfortable an experience, at least if one has any empathy for Blue Washington, an actor who it seems had talent, even if it is sublimated beneath insensitive clichés here.